How to Cook a Moose (39 page)

5:00 a.m.—Dawn breaks and the birds starting singing. I lay still in my bed, eyes wide open, cocooned under many blankets until I am ready to throw off the covers and bear the early-morning chill of my camper. Winter is slow in retreating this year, and a handful of nights have been below-freezing temperatures.

5:30 a.m.—I bundle up, step into my rubber boots, and stomp through the muddy field over to the yurt. This week, the crescent moon has still been visible in the sky as the pink sunrise begins to filter through the trees. I do a twenty-minute yoga routine in the yurt, fully bundled, and begin to wake up my body.

6:00 a.m.—I return to my camper, stream NPR
Morning Edition
through my phone while I prepare coffee and breakfast. In the early season, farm work begins at 8:00 am, so I have plenty of time to sip slowly, wash up, and get ready for the day.

7:45 a.m.—I commute to the barn via a five-minute walk through the field, and I check in with the crew for our game plan for the day. The work is varied and continuous: My first week of tasks included trimming about 1,000 onions, repairing the high tunnel, digging holes for new trees, clearing a thicket of brambles, potting up tomatoes in the greenhouse and thinning brassicas, and assembling a shelving unit. Some of the work is quite physical and repetitive, and some is very focused and detailed. I find that I am quickly able to get “into the zone,” and love the tasks that for some would seem tedious. I can work with little seedlings for four hours at a stretch and feel a deep sense of presence and peace.

12:00 p.m.—We break for lunch. I generally retreat to my camper and prepare something quickly—a sandwich wrap, or heat up some soup. If it's nice, I'll sit outside on my “porch” for a few minutes, or if I'm tired, sneak in a ten- to fifteen-minute nap. On Thursdays, someone from the crew cooks lunch for everyone.

1:00 p.m.—We work for another four hours, solid.

5:00 p.m.—Day is done. I cook dinner in my camper and then spend most of the rest of the evening in the yurt, where there is a woodstove and I can stay warmer. I build myself a fire, heat up water for a cup of tea, light candles and the oil lamp. I cuddle up on the sofa under a wool blanket and read for about two hours. Then, around 9:00 p.m., I do another twenty minutes of yoga and make my way back to the camper, using my headlamp to light the way. I'll often spot deer leaping through the fields at night, and I always marvel at the abundance of stars. I quickly get into my long underwear and pajamas and burrow under a sleeping bag and four blankets, nodding off around 10:00 p.m.

And when I wake and hear the birds start singing again the next morning, I smile and think, “It's so good to be here. This is the way life should be.”

But life on the farm was by no means a romantic fantasy:

It was cold and damp, the kind of cold that settles into your bones and only a hot shower can cure. Nights dipped down to the 30s, and while I felt fairly confident in my fire-making skills a week ago, there were nights this week that I simply could not get anything to burn. One night when I desperately needed a roaring fire, I failed repeatedly, and cracked open a bottle of whiskey instead in a last-ditch attempt to warm up. I burrowed into my sleeping bag as soon as the sun went down. I missed my city friends and my cozy apartment intensely that night, feeling frozen and alone.

And when the weather is spotty and spring is slow in coming, things get stressful on the farm. With one eye on the ground and the other on the skies, Laura has to make real-time decisions about the operation that are critical for the timing of planting and harvest. On Wednesday, a chilly, overcast day with rain looming in the forecast, we hustled to get our first round of crops into the ground: rainbow chard, three kinds of kale, and napa cabbage. Right now, we are a crew of three—Laura, Abi, and me. Another apprentice will join us in a few weeks and we'll get some additional labor help from CSA work-share members. But that day the three of us transplanted about 3,000 seedlings into the ground. Calculate how many squats that is per person and you'll wince, or cry.

Needless to say, I was a little stiff the next couple of days. But along with the soreness also came a few moments of humility that bruised me too. It goes without saying that I'm new at this, and any apprentice is going to make mistakes as they develop and grow. But I really, really hate making mistakes and am hard on myself when I slip up. I'm trying to get better at shaking off those errors and just seeing them as they are—opportunities to learn—but I often allow them to build into rain clouds that hover over my psyche the rest of the day.

But as Jane Kenyon says, “How much better it is to carry wood to the fire than to moan about your life.” And it's true and a little bit miraculous what a good day of hard work and a spot of sunshine can do to turn your attitude around. By the time the skies cleared on Thursday afternoon, I had let go of my self-doubt and felt grateful to be exactly where I was.

In late August, almost five months after KJ had arrived, Brendan and I drove out to visit KJ and get a tour of the farm and see her new life. The drive from Portland was just under an hour. We headed down the interstate, then turned inland before Kennebunk and drove along rolling country roads, past farms and through woods and rustic small towns. It's amazing how quickly the city gives way to the countryside outside of Portland.

Black Kettle Farm is located in Lyman, Maine, on twelve acres of land, four and a half of which are cultivated. It sits atop a ridge nestled between the foothills of the White Mountains and the seacoast, surrounded by birch woods and stone walls.

As we turned in at the farm and parked in front of the farmhouse, KJ came out with a jar of beautiful flowers; my birthday had been the week before. I hardly recognized the chic, urban, pale, professionally dressed young woman I'd walked through the rain with in Times Square. Now, she was tan and muscular, glowing with health and well-being, vitality and energy. She wore work clothes and boots. She looked gorgeous.

“Life in Maine seems to agree with you,” I said, after we'd exchanged greetings.

“Oh, I love it here.” She showed me her wrist. “A few weeks ago, I did a small thing that made a big difference. I took off my watch. At first, it was simply to get rid of the tacky tan line I'd developed, but then I noticed how it altered my sense of time. It changed my perception of the day from ‘What's next?' to ‘Where am I now?'”

Just then, Dingo caught sight of a cat who'd come over to see who the hell he was. Dingo lunged at him, snarling with murderous bloodlust, but was luckily brought up short by his leash.

“That's Steve,” said KJ. “One of the farm cats.”

Steve didn't seem in the least bit scared of Dingo, who had started to foam at the mouth and make hoarse, guttural sounds in his throat. Brendan put the agitated dog back in the shaded car, with the windows open.

We wandered off to see the place. Four young women ran Black Kettle Farm. The farmer, Laura, was thirty-seven. Her full-time employee, Abi, was thirty-six. KJ had just turned thirty-four, and Shannon, the other apprentice, was twenty-three, just out of college. They ate one meal together a week, a staff lunch; otherwise, they worked together all day and were on their own every morning, noon, and evening. It was a Saturday, and the other three women were either taking the day off or at the Portsmouth farmers' market, selling produce. It was KJ's turn to mind the farm, so we had the place to ourselves.

“One of the things that really appealed to me about Black Kettle, when I was applying for apprenticeships, was the solitude,” said KJ. “Other farms promote constant togetherness among the workers. I love having a lot of time to myself before and after work. And also, it's the size of the farm I can see myself having someday: small enough to be manageable, but large enough to be productive and solvent.”

She told us that with the money from a hundred or so families who have CSA shares, plus the produce they sell to many local restaurants, including a few of our favorites in Portland, Laura managed to make a small but decent living and pay her workers a fair wage. I was impressed.

The small farmhouse was simple; the barn, too—unpretentious New England structures, weather-beaten and sagging a bit, but well-tended.

“Laura's been making the house her own, little by little,” KJ told us.

We headed over to the barn where, hanging on a hook by the big door, was the old black kettle of the farm's name.

Downstairs, the barn was orderly, the plank tables and shelves almost empty, the chalkboard next to the scale listing that week's haul in neat lettering: kale, lettuce, herbs, potatoes, sweet peppers, broccoli, eggplant, sweet peppers, and tomatoes, none of which were in evidence. The farm's CSA members had recently come to pick up their weekly boxes, which explained the provisional, fleeting-feeling emptiness downstairs.

But upstairs in the hayloft, KJ and the other apprentice, Shannon, had hung rows of newly harvested garlic, several varieties, all sorted and labeled. The garlic looked very fresh, with clean white papery skin and pleasingly fat bulbs. The strong, appetizing smell of fresh garlic filled the air.

Beyond the small parking lot, near the farmhouse and barn, KJ showed us the half-acre perennial garden where they grew sage, oregano, thyme, chives, lavender, and mint, as well as medicinal herbs like echinacea, yarrow, and St. John's wort, which they sold to restaurants and at market. A neighbor kept her beehives nearby, so the flowers provided nectar for the bees and were in turn pollinated. As we watched, buzzing bees hovered over the flowers, landed and drank, moving on. It was a peaceful sight, a perfect natural symbiosis in a small meadow by the road. I could have stood there and watched much longer; the smells of the herbs and flowers were heady in the sunlight, and the sound of the bees put me into an instant daydream.

The farm had two greenhouses, both of which Laura built herself. One was heated, consisting of rustic old pallets on cinder blocks; this was where the seedlings germinated until they were ready to be transplanted. The other, the high tunnel, housed several different varieties of tomato vines as well as peppers and basil. When we walked into
this one, the smells of basil and tomatoes, concentrated in the solar-heated air, immediately transported me to an Italian kitchen and made my mouth water.

Beyond the greenhouses was the farm's main event—rows upon rows of vegetable gardens, four cultivated acres in all. Like the bottom part of the barn, the gardens appeared to be in a state of temporary, hard-won quietude; KJ told us that late August is an in-between season, when the spring shift is done and they're planting the fall shift. Many of the vegetables had been harvested, a monumental amount of work.

Imagining the long days spent bending and squatting in these fields in the sun and rain, I gazed out over the beautiful, meticulous, healthy, deeply colored rows of live, growing vegetables, among which were three varieties of salad mix planted cheek by jowl in a long row for maximum ease of picking and mixing, plus kohlrabi, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts. A patch of lettuces had been allowed to “bolt,” or flower, which creates seeds. The plants were leggy and tall and blooming. Others sat in fat green globes, ruffling in the breeze.

“Do you do it all by hand?” I asked KJ.

“Mostly,” she said. “But we do have some machines. My favorite farm tool so far is called the dibbler. When I first saw the thing, I thought it looked like some kind of medieval torture device, or something from a Renaissance fair. I'm sure there are fancier premade models available for purchase, but this one appears to be a cobbled-together contraption of PVC pipe and wooden spikes, set six inches apart in three rows. The idea is that Laura creates a bed in the field with her tractor, the tractor wheel treads becoming the aisles between where we will plant. Then she runs down the bed with a three-pronged implement attached to her tractor to create the lines in the bed; most of our plants are in two or three rows per bed. Then, we pull the dibbler down the length of the bed to create ‘dibbles,' which are evenly spaced holes where we drop and plant our seedlings.”

In one patch, they had planted “blue ballet” squash to attract insects away from the watermelon and delicata squash, which I thought was an ingenious way of avoiding the use of pesticides.

“Are there a lot of weeds?” I asked innocently.

“So. Many. Weeds,” KJ said. “One week I spent hours upon hours pulling up weeds. It could make a person batty if you let it, but it can also be good therapy, to see a weedy patch fully cleared and the plants given new opportunity to produce and thrive.”

We followed KJ back to the pigpen, a large fenced area with some shade, some sun, a shack, and all manner of huge plastic water containers. Six healthy pigs came over to greet us. They looked well-fed and plump, and—I had to admit to myself, being an avid eater of good pork—delicious.

KJ told us that the pigs' two favorite things to do, not surprisingly, are to root on the ground through ever-replenished heaps of fresh vegetable scraps from the farm, which are regularly thrown into their pen, and to wallow in the cool mud near their huge water containers, which is augmented by humans passing by and spraying their wallow with the hose, as KJ did. They also eat fifty pounds of grain a day from the grain dispenser set up in the middle of the pen.

Every spring, Laura started over with new piglets. After they're butchered in the fall, she distributes seventy-pound half-shares of each pig, along with any lard and innards, as people request them.

Despite this rapid turnover, the pigs all had names.

“The largest is Big Digs, or Dirk Diggler, because of his big wattles,” KJ told us. He did indeed have large, pendulous growths on each cheek that reminded me of a pink, fleshy version of the side curls worn by Orthodox Jews, who don't eat pork (an irony I appreciated silently).

Pigs are appealing animals, even covered with mud, grunting, and wallowing, and these were the happiest pigs I'd ever seen. They appeared to be smiling. They clearly enjoyed butting up against one
another, lying in puppylike heaps, and exploring the pile of leafy kale leaves and carrot tops with their snouts. Their bodies were robust and agleam with edible health. Yes, they'd be slaughtered in the fall, which was soon, but their short life was anything but nasty and brutish; from where I stood, in fact, it looked idyllic.